School Change 2.0 is about to meet up with New Media 2.0 in New Haven. You’re invited to join the party.
The experiment within an experiment culminates on the evening of Nov. 30 with a multi-media live and cyberspace book-group discussion. The topic: Where should our schools be headed? What’s the best way to get there?
It starts with the most old-school of communications media: a hard-cover book. It continues by bringing together a national expert, local people making school change happen on the ground, and everyone else in New Haven and Connecticut who cares about public education, to get together in a school, in cyberspace, and on the air.
Diane Ravitch.
Diane Ravitch wrote the book. She’s one of the longest-serving and most intellectually interesting of America’s education policy thinkers. A new book she wrote on the state of school reform, “The Death And Life Of The Great American School System,” has ricocheted into the churning debate over how the country should rescue and re-engineer its public schools.After helping to set national policy in the White House and then returning to academic life, Ravitch has changed her mind about what works and what doesn’t. She has inspired legions of critics and fans, as the national conversation moves to a new phase. Call it School Change 2.0.
New Media 2.0
Meanwhile New Haven is helping to forge that new approach — looking beyond rigid ideological frameworks — as it embarks on one of the nation’s most closely watched school change efforts. Unlike School Change 1.0 — the first round of experiments in selected communities across the country — the emerging New Haven effort borrows and builds on ideas from all sides of the debate over what works best.
The Nov. 30 multi-dimensional discussion is an experiment, too, in developing a new way for different groups of people in a community to hash out complicated issues that affect their lives. It’ll happen in person and online, in several ways. A TV station, news website, and radio station will combine forces to provide a platform for people from all walks of life to engage together in real time. Call it New Media 2.0.
The Independent has asked 12 people involved at the ground level in our local education experiments — teachers, students, administrators, parents, watchdogs — to read Ravitch’s book. They’re doing that now.
Then, on Nov. 30, Ravitch plans to come to New Haven for an event sponsored by the Independent, WTNH and WNPR. She’ll sit with those 12 local readers for a roundtable discussion at Co-Op High School about how to turn around the schools — bringing the big ideas down to the grassroots here at home. You’ll be able to watch it at home as it happens; WTNH will live-stream the event on its website and on the Independent and WNPR websites. WNPR will also broadcast audio from the event.
Meanwhile, live at the event, another panel will be launching a second discussion. Reporters and elected officials who follow school change policies will live-blog the event as it happens. They’ll be discussing it together — and with you. Their blog conversation will be live-streamed as the event happens. You’ll be able to log right in and add your comments to the dialogue, a virtual book-group meeting.
After the hour-long panel discussion, Ravitch will field questions from others at the event.
The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has provided financial support to make the Nov. 30 event happen. R. J. Julia Booksellers’ “Just The Right Book” donated the books for the panel. (You can order the book here.)
So read up, think about what what’s on the table, and get ready to help usher in a new era of both school change and community conversation.
School Change 2.0
That conversation takes place as New Haven’s school reform drive is still in its infancy. It hasn’t produced results yet. It has produced a fountain of ideas. Like so many ambitious social experiments in town over the past half century, it has inspired lots of smart people to think about policy in new ways. And like those other experiments, it desperately needs all parts of the public to weigh in from the outset.
The New Haven experiment reconstitutes under-performing schools in both not-for-profit charter and traditional public-school settings; and it first makes special efforts to improve those schools. The New Haven experiment has made it easier to fire failing teachers, but before doing so, it aims to help struggling instructors.
Most strikingly, the city has worked with the teachers union, rather than fighting it.
The New Haven experiment seeks “accountability” through hard measures that identify failing (as well as successful) schools and teachers. But it also goes beyond a strict reliance on just math and English standardized test scores. It does include those, but it also is developing more elaborate ways of judging what’s being taught and learned in the classroom. Teachers, schools, and administrators are all being graded.
And New Haven’s in the process of developing a way to get more kids to graduate high school and proceed to successful college careers, partly through a promise of dough from Yale and the Community Foundation, partly through a community campaign to enlist parents, teachers, and undergraduate volunteers to help students to prepare over 13 years to become college students.